by Luanne Rice
“Why do you go down to the beach before the sun's all the way up?”
“Because there's no one else there,” Stevie said. “I'm a hermit.”
“Is that a special kind of witch?”
Stevie smiled. “Sort of,” she said.
A quiet breeze blew, and in the distance a motorboat started up. Stevie saw Tilly slink into the room, making herself invisible. The old cat sat statue-still in the corner, beside a Gothic-style birdhouse, watching her mistress and the stranger.
“Well,” Nell said, folding her napkin. “I'm very glad I met you.”
“And I'm very glad I met you,” Stevie said.
They stood up, facing each other. Stevie had many more questions she wanted to ask about Emma, about what had happened, but she remembered from her own experience the value of delicacy in such matters. Together they walked through the house, to the kitchen door. Tilly followed.
“Oh, a cat!” Nell said, spotting her. She made a move to pet Tilly and was met with a hiss and the whisk of a tail. “Oooh—sorry!”
“She's a bit crotchety,” Stevie said. “She's old.”
“I understand,” Nell said. She gazed around the kitchen, noticing all the sketches and watercolors of birds, squirrels, rabbits, field mice. “Are those from your books?”
“Some from books I haven't written yet.” Stevie paused. “Did your mom ever read my books to you?”
“No. I don't know why she didn't,” Nell said, apologetically. “Your pictures are really nice.”
“Thank you,” Stevie said, wondering herself why her old friend hadn't shown her daughter her work. She opened the door to let Nell out, but suddenly the child turned with a fierce expression on her face.
“The reason we went to Boston is a lot like the reason you painted your house not-blue,” Nell said.
“It is?”
Nell nodded. “It's because everything in Atlanta is so the-same. The same as it was when Mom was alive. The kitchen smells like her cooking; the yard looks like her planting. She sat in the chairs. Her shoes are in the closet. The . . . the hairbrush she brushed my hair with is there.”
Nell squeezed her eyes shut tight. Stevie knew she was feeling the touch of her mother's hand on her head. The pain on her face was wild and alive. It passed over to Stevie, who wished she could take it away, but knew she could not. Nell said with a whisper, “She died one year ago.”
“I'm so sorry, Nell.”
“It's too hard to live where she lived. So we had to leave.”
“Sometimes that helps,” Stevie said, gazing steadily at the child, her heart pierced with memories of losing her own mother, of the winter her father had taken a sabbatical in Paris, and the summer they couldn't bear Hubbard's Point and went to Newport instead. They had always, eventually, returned.
“Will we ever go back?” Nell asked suddenly. She lurched forward, as if she wanted to grasp Stevie's hand. She gazed into Stevie's eyes, as if wanting her to be an oracle, to have the answers.
Stevie wanted to say the right thing—for Emma. She wanted to grab this moment, be wise and kind, help her dear friend's child through this terrible moment. A film of tears separated them, and when Stevie blinked, they went rolling down her cheeks. Awash in grief for the loss of a friend she hadn't seen in over twenty-five years, she could barely speak.
“Leaving a place doesn't have to be forever,” she said finally. “Sometimes it's the best thing you can do, and then, all of a sudden, you'll find it's time to go home.”
“Time to go home,” Nell said, grabbing onto the words.
“Meanwhile,” Stevie said, “your aunt can come to visit with you and your father while you're here. Hubbard's Point isn't far from Rhode Island—”
“She can't come,” Nell said so sharply that Stevie was taken aback. She cast around for something comfortable to say.
“Well, I think you're a very smart girl, leaving Atlanta for a while. Sometimes it's a very good idea to go away,” Stevie said. “I find that when I stay in the same place too long, I forget where I put myself.” They both smiled at the strange turn of phrase.
“Like now?” Nell asked.
“Now?”
Nell's brown head remained cocked as a great smile came to her lips. She stood right there in Stevie's kitchen door, looking as pleased with herself as a small brown wren.
“You've forgotten that you need to go to the beach more,” Nell said. “Not just before the sun comes up! My goodness, it's dark then! You need sun and waves and hot sand under your feet!”
“I do, do I?”
Nell nodded vigorously, earnestly, with such heart that Stevie was more reminded of a small brown wren than ever, and Nell said, “You do! Hot sand!”
Then Nell thanked her, and they said goodbye, shook hands, and Nell started down the hill. Watching her go, Stevie felt a series of pangs that could not immediately be identified. All she knew was that “goodbye” felt like a very precarious word to end on.
“And just why do I need hot sand?” she called.
“Because you're a beach girl!” Nell called, shooting Stevie a wicked, wonderful grin that instantly put Stevie in mind of Emma—the image sent a shiver through her body, down to her knees. Stevie watched the girl make her way down the hill. Tilly came to stand with her by the open door.
Nell waved once. And then she was gone.
“WHERE WERE YOU?” Jack asked the minute Nell walked into the cottage. It was small and functional, set up for rentals. Standard-issue duck-covered sofa, two armchairs facing a big TV, Formica table and four chairs, framed generic seascapes.
“We were about to call out the National Guard,” Francesca said.
“That would be a big waste of the taxpayers' money,” Nell said.
“Nell . . .” Jack said warningly. “Be polite.”
“I'm sorry. ‘Ma'am,' I should've said.”
Francesca, to her credit, looked amused. “I just adore being called ‘ma'am,'” she said. “How did you know?”
Nell shrugged. Jack noticed that her knees were all skinned, with two small Band-Aids trying to cover them up. “What happened?” he asked.
“I took a spill,” Nell said.
“Who gave you the Band-Aids?”
“A nice lady.”
Jack stared at his daughter. When she was mad, she could seethe with the best of them. The news that Francesca was driving down from Boston for tennis and a swim had set something off, and it was still in motion. Jack saw the darkness in his daughter's eyes and wished he could chase it away.
“Nell. You told Francesca you were going to the beach. We went down to look for you, and you weren't there. Francesca was only half kidding when she said we were going to call out the forces. I was going to give you five more minutes, and then I was dialing 911. You could have drowned, you could have been kidnapped—that's what goes through your old man's mind. So—take it from the top. What nice lady?”
“A friend of Mom's.”
Jack stared. He thought he heard Francesca clear her throat: a very polite, quiet “ahem.”
“How did you happen to run into a friend of Mom's? Mom's family stopped coming here a long time ago.”
“Some things don't change over time,” Nell said, casting a sidelong glance at Francesca. “Some friendships last forever. The important ones.”
“What's the friend's name?”
“Stevie Moore.”
“Oh my God!” Francesca said. “The one who writes children's books?”
Nell nodded. “She was my mother's best friend when they were young.”
Jack tried to remember Emma's beach friends, but they all blurred together. He had only had eyes for Emma. But Stevie Moore was a familiar name; Emma had had some issue with her books, hadn't wanted Nell to read them.
“That is just so, so cool,” Francesca said. “I used to love her books when I was little. In fact, the one she wrote about birds' nests inspired me to become an engineer, I swear. All those amazing drawings—she m
ade them look like blueprints! Sticks, twigs, scraps of paper, ribbon—when you clean your hairbrush and put the hair on your windowsill, birds take it and weave it into their nests.”
Jack watched Nell for her reaction, and it came.
“My mother used to do that,” Nell said. “Brushed my hair and shared with the mama birds, to help them build their nests . . .”
She was right: Emma had done that very thing. After brushing Nell's hair . . . it had been part of the ritual, and Jack had loved to see her do it; it had seemed part of who Emma was, how much she had loved being Nell's mother.
Jack stared at Nell. How had she tracked down her mother's friend? She hadn't asked him for help—or had she? What were those questions about the blue house at the end of the beach? Was she keeping secrets again? He remembered those terrible nights last winter, when she had woken herself up screaming for her mother. Six months with a therapist had helped—they were experimenting by taking the summer off. Dr. Galford was two hours away, in Boston. Nell still had trouble sleeping, but at least the screams were no longer bloodcurdling.
“Back to the Band-Aids, Nell. What happened?”
“Well, like I said, Dad. I took a fall, and Stevie fixed me up.”
Stevie. Jack narrowed his eyes, giving Nell his sternest look, but she just looked back with that implacable green gaze. “Would you like to tell me how you found her?”
“All the kids around here know her. They flock to her house.”
“Like the birds she paints!” Francesca said.
“You know, you're almost like a kid yourself,” Nell said so radiantly that Francesca missed the barb and beamed.
Jack was tired. He had planned to take everyone out for a shore dinner, but right now he just wanted to lie down and stop thinking. Since Emma's death a year ago, anything could wear him down. He wanted her here, back with him, right now. He wanted it so badly, he knew that was why he had returned to the beach where he'd first met her, and he knew—thinking of Nell seeking out Emma's best friend and seeing the glitter the meeting had put in her eyes—that coming to this beach was a huge mistake.
“Just don't bother her again,” Jack said. “That's an order.”
“I won't,” Nell promised.
“I want you to make best friends of your own,” Jack said. “Kids your own age, to play with at the beach.”
Nell giggled.
“What's so funny?”
“Nothing. 'Cept that when you say ‘kids my own age' you remind me of something she said. Stevie mentioned you,” Nell said.
“What did she say?”
“That you were ancient!” Nell laughed teasingly, but the look she shot Francesca was all business. And by the time she looked back at her father, her eyes were once again wide-open, waiting, devoid of the joke. Jack tried to take her hand now, but she ran out of the room, up the stairs. He heard her footsteps on the bare boards overhead. Francesca walked over to hug him, whisper something in his ear, but he couldn't feel her or hear her.
Chapter 3
STEVIE'S NEXT BOOK WAS provisionally titled Red Nectar, about hummingbirds and their penchant for red flowers. Although she was under a tight deadline to finish, that evening she set it aside and began a series of watercolor sketches of a small brown wren.
Tilly looked on with total disapproval. She knew, somehow—Stevie had long since stopped trying to understand the mystical connection between her and the cat, had ceased trying to look through the veil between humans and felines—that her mistress was shirking her work duty in favor of inspiration not likely to bring money and likely to bring a certain amount of pain.
Generally Stevie preferred to paint—or at least draw—from life. Every one of her books had come from real-life stories, birds that had entered her sphere, if only for a very short time. She liked to set up her paints in the backyard, behind the hedge, and draw the birds that landed at her feeders, pecked in her yard, perched on her roof. But right now it was dark, and there were no wrens awake—and besides, this particular wren was not really a wren.
Tilly grumbled. When Stevie glanced over, the cat showed her teeth—the front four missing. “Till—let me finish, okay? Then I'll go mousing with you.”
She used a block of watercolor paper and paints from Sennelier on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, her favorite art supply store. A soft green wash, fine brushstrokes suggesting obsidian leaves—the color a close match for Nell's eyes. The bird, nut brown, chestnut-smooth, eyes alert and curious. Stevie knew the criticism she always received—imbuing birds with human characteristics. Could she help it if that was how she saw the world? One big anthropomorphic and wrongheaded story about creatures and humans and their ever sad-ending quest for love?
She sketched a baby wren in the nest overhead. Learning to fly. Perched on the branch. Spread your wings. . . . You can do it. . . . The mother looking up, giving encouragement.
Then, the next frame: baby alone, mother gone. A flood of emotion swamped her, but she rechanneled it: “Oh, Emma,” she said. And, Nell.
Stevie held her brush, out of breath as if she had just learned to fly herself. The sable brush dripped on the picture. Tears, she thought. Crying for the lost mother, the lonely child.
Children abandoned by the universe—and that was how it felt to those whose mothers went away or died young—always spent their lives seeking perfect, intense union. Anything less felt like a failure. Stevie thought about all the pain that quest had caused herself and others. Discouraged by it all, she had just devoted herself to writing and painting. But she had had that closeness with the beach girls.
How had she let those friendships slip away? Great friends who had known her, and each other, so well. Stevie closed her eyes tight, and a snapshot of Emma flashed: pixie-cut brown hair, blue-and-white-striped bathing suit, pierced earrings, laughing so hard she was holding her sides. She could make Stevie and Maddie crack up with a word or a look.
Stevie hadn't realized till just now how much she missed her friends. Maybe they could have kept her from self-destructing in love. Her quest for intensity of connection, passion in all things, had led her to this spot: sitting alone in her quiet beach house. She had become such a recluse; she couldn't remember the last visitor she'd had before Nell. She found herself wondering about Jack, hoping he was a good father.
Too bad wrens—humans, for that matter—couldn't learn something from the emperor penguin. She remembered a trip—a research expedition—to Antarctica, with Linus Mars, her second husband. She remembered the fragile light, the quilt of darkness, the closeness of stars—the way they had hung, low in the sky, like lanterns just waiting to be picked up and carried. She recalled the fur blankets, and how they had made her cry, because life was hard enough for creatures on the tundra without humans slaughtering them for their skins.
Linus had held her, in love but amused. How funny it was, to love a woman with such a soft heart that she would mourn for dead animals with such fervor that she'd rather be cold than wrapped in their pelts. Even then—and it was their honeymoon, as well as a research trip—Stevie had known she had made a mistake in marrying him. The passion she'd felt for Linus was as strong as ever, but it gave way to the dawning realization that there was a fold between them—a wrinkle in their relationship, in their universe—and it was big, and came between them.
Linus could always step back from her and see her from the distance of humor, amusement, judgment. But Stevie's fatal flaw was her longing to be as one with the man she loved, to merge her heart and soul with his completely. He was a scientist; she was an artist. His sketches were analytical, seeking greater understanding of the penguins' amazing adaptations to a brutally harsh environment. Hers, although also analytical, steered for the emotional, the miraculous, the outstandingly warm heart of a wickedly cold climate bird.
Stevie had met Dr. Linus Mars in Woods Hole, at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where he was presenting a paper on Aptenodytes foresteri—emperor penguins. She was there to gain background f
or her next book, The Good Father, based on the birds.
She had sat, rapt, as Linus lectured on the largest species of penguin. Unable to fly, they spent their entire lives on pack ice in Antarctica, kept warm by their blubber and seventy-five feathers per square inch, more than any other bird.
“They huddle together en masse,” Linus said, standing at the front of the dark auditorium as photographs he had taken on his last expedition flashed on the screen. Light from the screen behind illuminated craggy features: honey brown hair that needed cutting, high cheekbones, a long straight nose, a strong chin. Sitting in the front row, Stevie thought he looked like an Oxford don.
Which he was.
“They move in a sort of dance, choreographed by the cold. Constantly moving, circulating, they take turns standing at the center of the circle. March is the onset of winter—when nearly all other life has left the continent—but Aptenodytes foresteri stays to breed.”
Stevie had shivered in her seat, in the air-conditioned hush of the small theater, thinking of the romance of penguins, their ice dance and mating ritual. Dr. Mars looked right at her—he really did, she was convinced to this day—and said, “They have quite a courtship. It lasts several weeks, which seems to be enough.”
Could he see her blush in the dark? Impossible, Stevie thought, but he didn't look away. She was holding a notebook in her left hand, and she saw him look straight at her ring finger. She was married at the time—it must be admitted, there was no getting around it—to a man she had met in art school. Kevin Lassiter. Artist, musician, chef, alcoholic. Dr. Mars stared at her wedding band—designed by Kevin himself—and Stevie thought, Good; let there be no mistake that I am a married woman.
“After the courtship,” Dr. Mars said in his beautiful English accent, “the female lays an egg—one single egg. And then . . . she leaves. She is quite a feminist, to use the vernacular, and in that same spirit, although I normally fail my students for making any such humanistic equation, he, the father, is quite a liberated man.
“While she traverses up to seventy kilometers to reach the open sea to feed, he stays with his fellows to tend the egg. Balanced on his feet—which shuffle constantly as the penguins take turns in the center of the crowd—the egg stays safe in his brood pouch. Liberated man indeed!”
